The World to Come (Exhibition & Symposium)

September 18, 2018 – March 3, 2019 (Exhibition)

October 19–20, 2018 (Symposium)

Harn Museum of Art

University of Florida

The World toCome is a major international exhibition of contemporary art and an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the greatest planetary crisis of our era.

The exhibition, The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, chronicles an era of rapid, radical and irrevocable ecological change through works of art by more than 45 contemporary international artists. We live in a world of imminent extinctions, runaway climate change and the depletion of biodiversity and resources. Our age has been identified as the Anthropocene, a controversial term used to name a new geological epoch defined by human impact. While geological epochs are known as products of slow change, the Anthropocene has been characterized by speed: rising water, surging population and new technologies that compress our breathless sense of space and time. Philosopher Santiago Zabala, echoing Heidegger, warns, “The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.”

The symposium, “The World to Come: Art, Politics, and Climate Change,” features lectures and roundtable discussions by artists, art historians, climate scientists, and anthropologists, on the themes of the exhibition. Together we will confront the challenges of artistic, political and personal practice in the late Anthropocene, in search of ways forward to a more vibrant, compassionate and just future.

For more information on the exhibition and the symposium, follow the links below.

Support for “The World to Come” is from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, UF Center for Humanities & the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment), Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History Lecture Series (keynote), UF Imagining Climate Change, UF Office of Research, and the generosity of several private donors.

Image: Maroesjka Lavigne, White Rhino, Namibia. From the series Land of Nothingness (2015). Courtesy of the artist.